Space Viking, H. Beam Piper [best classic romance novels txt] 📗

hours, and spaced out. The Viking’s Gift of Beowulf came in with a cargo, and went on orbit after discharging it to join the watch. A Gilgamesher came in from Amaterasu and reported everything quiet there; as soon as her captain had sold his cargo, with a minimum of haggling, he spaced out again. His behavior convinced everybody that the attack would come in a matter of hours.

It didn’t.

Three thousand hours had passed since the first warning had reached Tanith, that made five thousand since Viktor’s ships were supposed to have left Xochitl. There were those, Boake Valkanhayn among them, who doubted, now, if he ever had.

“The whole thing’s just a big Gilgamesher lie,” he was declaring. “Somebody⁠—Nikky Gratham, or the Everrards, or maybe Viktor himself⁠—paid them to tell us that, to pin our ships down here. Or they made it up themselves, so they could make hay on our trade-planets.”

“Let’s go down to the Ghetto and clean out the whole gang,” somebody else took up. “Anything one of them’s in, they’re all in together.”

“Nifflheim with that; let’s all space out for Xochitl,” Manfred Ravallo proposed. “We have enough ships to lick them on Tanith, we have enough to lick them on their own planet.”

He managed to talk them out of both courses of action⁠—what was he, anyhow; sovereign Prince of Tanith, or the non-ruling King of Marduk, or just the chieftain of a disciplineless gang of barbarians? One of the independents spaced out in disgust. The next day, two others came in, loaded with booty from a raid on Braggi, and decided to stay around for a while and see what happened.

And four days after that, a five-hundred-foot hyperspace yacht, bearing the daggers and chevrons of Bigglersport, came in. As soon as she was out of the last microjump, she began calling by screen.

Trask didn’t know the man who was screening, but Hugh Rathmore did; Duke Joris’ confidential secretary.

“Prince Trask; I must speak to you as soon as possible,” he began, almost stuttering. Whatever the urgency of his mission, one would have thought that a three-thousand-hour voyage would have taken some of the edge from it. “It is of the first importance.”

“You are speaking to me. This screen is reasonably secure. And if it’s of the first importance, the sooner you tell me about it.⁠ ⁠…”

“Prince Trask, you must come to Gram, with every man and every ship you can command. Satan only knows what’s happening there now, but three thousand hours ago, when the Duke sent me off, Omfray of Glaspyth was landing on Wardshaven. He has a fleet of eight ships, furnished to him by his wife’s kinsman, the King of Haulteclere. They are commanded by King Konrad’s Space Viking cousin, the Prince of Xochitl.”

Then a look of shocked surprise came into the face of the man in the screen, and Trask wondered why, until he realized that he had leaned back in his chair and was laughing uproariously. Before he could apologize, the man in the screen had found his voice.

“I know, Prince Trask; you have no reason to think kindly of King Angus⁠—the former King Angus, or maybe even the late King Angus, I suppose he is now⁠—but a murderer like Omfray of Glaspyth.⁠ ⁠…”

It took a little time to explain to the confidential secretary of the Duke of Bigglersport the humor of the situation.

There were others at Rivington to whom it was not immediately evident. The professional Space Vikings, men like Valkanhayn and Ravallo and Alvyn Karffard, were disgusted. Here they’d been sitting, on combat alert, all these months, and, if they’d only known, they could have gone to Xochitl and looted it clean long ago. The Gram party were outraged. Angus of Wardshaven had been bad enough, with the hereditary taint of the Mad Baron of Blackcliffe, and Queen Evita and her rapacious family, but even he was preferable to a murderous villain⁠—some even called him a fiend in human shape⁠—like Omfray of Glaspyth.

Both parties, of course, were positive as to where their Prince’s duty lay. The former insisted that everything on Tanith that could be put into hyperspace should be dispatched at once to Xochitl, to haul back from it everything except a few absolutely immovable natural features of the planet. The latter clamored, just as loudly and passionately, that everybody on Tanith who could pull a trigger should be embarked at once on a crusade for the deliverance of Gram.

“You don’t want to do either, do you?” Harkaman asked him, when they were alone after the second day of acrimony.

“Nifflheim, no! This crowd that wants an attack on Xochitl; you know what would happen if we did that?” Harkaman was silent, waiting for him to continue. “Inside a year, four or five of these small planet-holders like Gratham and the Everrards would combine against us and make a slag-pile out of Tanith.”

Harkaman nodded agreement. “Since we warned him the first time, Viktor’s kept his ships away from our planets. If we attacked Xochitl now, without provocation, nobody’d know what to expect from us. People like Nikky Gratham and Tobbin of Nergal and the Everrards of Hoth get nervous around unpredictable dangers, and when they get nervous they get trigger-happy.” He puffed slowly on his pipe and then said: “Then you’ll be going back to Gram.”

“That doesn’t follow; just because Valkanhayn and Ravallo and that crowd are wrong doesn’t make Valpry and Rathmore and Ffayle right. You heard what I was telling those very people at Karvall House, the day I met you. And you’ve seen what’s been happening on Gram since we came out here. Otto, the Sword-Worlds are finished; they’re half decivilized now. Civilization is alive and growing here on Tanith. I want to stay here and help it grow.”

“Look, Lucas,” Harkaman said. “You’re Prince of Tanith, and I’m only the Admiral. But I’m telling you; you’ll have to do something, or this whole setup of yours will fall apart. As it stands, you can attack Xochitl and the Back-To-Gram party